Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  Yes, the medal reminded me of Humboldt. Yes, when Napoleon gave the French intellectuals ribbons stars and baubles, he knew what he was doing. He took a boatload of scholars with him to Egypt. He ditched them. They came up with the Rosetta stone. From the time of Richelieu and earlier, the French had been big in the culture business. You’d never catch De Gaulle wearing one of these ridiculous trinkets. He had too much self-esteem. The fellows who bought Manhattan from the Indians didn’t wear beads themselves. I would gladly have given this gold medal to Humboldt. The Germans tried to honor him. He was invited to Berlin in 1952 to lecture at the Free University. He wouldn’t go. He was afraid of being abducted by the GPU or the NKVD. He was a longtime contributor to the Partisan Review and a prominent anti-Stalinist, so he was afraid that the Russians would try to kidnap and kill him. “Also, if I spent a year in Germany I’d be thinking of one thing only,” he stated publicly (I was the only one listening). “For twelve months I’d be a Jew and nothing else. I can’t afford to give an entire year to that.” But I think a better explanation is that he was having a grand time being mad in New York. He was seeing psychiatrists and making scenes. He invented a lover for Kathleen and then he tried to kill the man. He smashed up the Buick Roadmaster. He accused me of stealing his personality for the character of Von Trenck. He drew a check on my account for six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents and bought an Oldsmobile with it, among other things. Anyway, he didn’t want to go to Germany, a country where no one could follow his conversation.

  From the papers he later learned that I had become a Shoveleer. I had heard that he was living with a gorgeous black girl who studied the French horn at the Juilliard School. But when I last saw him on Forty-sixth Street I knew that he was too destroyed to be living with anyone. He was destroyed—I can’t help repeating this. He wore a large gray suit in which he was floundering. His face was dead gray, East River gray. His head looked as if the gypsy moth had gotten into it and tented in his hair. Nevertheless I should have approached and spoken to him. I should have drawn near, not taken cover behind the parked cars. But how could I? I had had my breakfast in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, served by rip-off footmen. Then I had flown in a helicopter with Javits and Bobby Kennedy. I was skirring around New York like an ephemerid, my jacket lined with jolly psychedelic green. I was dressed up like Sugar Ray Robinson. Only I didn’t have a fighting spirit, and seeing that my old and close friend was a dead man I beat it. I went to La Guardia and took a 727 back to Chicago. I sat afflicted in the plane, drinking whisky on the rocks, overcome with horror, ideas of Fate and other humanistic lah-de-dah—compassion. I had gone around the corner and gotten lost on Sixth Avenue. My legs trembled and my teeth were set hard. I said to myself, Humboldt good-by, I’ll see you in the next world. And two months after this in the Ilscombe Hotel, which has since collapsed, he started down at 3 a.m. with his garbage pail and died in the corridor.

  At a Village cocktail party in the Forties I heard a beautiful girl tell Humboldt, “Do you know what you’re like? You’re like a person from a painting.” Sure, women dreaming of love might have visions of Humboldt at twenty stepping down from a Renaissance or an Impressionist masterpiece. But the picture on the obituary page of the Times was frightful. I opened the paper one morning and there was Humboldt, ruined, black and gray, a disastrous newspaper face staring at me from death’s territory. That day, too, I was flying from New York to Chicago—wafting back and forth, not always knowing why. I went to the can and locked myself in. People knocked but I was weeping and wouldn’t come out.

  six

  “Actually Cantabile didn’t make me wait too long. He phoned just before noon. Maybe he was getting hungry. I remembered that someone or other in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth century used to see Verlaine drunken and bloated pounding his cane wildly on the sidewalk as he went to lunch, and shortly afterward the great mathematician Poincaré, respectably dressed and following his huge forehead while describing curves with his fingers, also on his way to lunch. Lunchtime is lunchtime, whether you are a poet or a mathematician or a gangster. Can-tabile said, “All right, you dumb prick, we’re going to meet right after lunch. Bring cash. And that’s all you bring. Don’t make any more bad moves.”

  “I wouldn’t know what or how,” I said.

  “That’s true, as long as you don’t cook up anything with George Swiebel. You come alone.”

  “Of course. It never even occurred to me—”

  “Well now I’ve said it, but it better not occur. Alone, and bring new bills. Go to the bank and get clean money. Nine bills of fifty. New. I don’t want any grease stains on those dollars. And be glad if I don’t make you eat that fucking check.”

  What a fascist! But maybe he was only priming or haranguing himself to keep up the savagery level. By now, however, my only object was to get rid of him by submission and agreement. “Any way you want it,” I said. “Where shall I bring this money?”

  “The Russian Bath on Division Street,” he said.

  “That old joint? For the love of God!”

  “You be in front, there, at one-forty-five and wait. And alone!” he said.

  I answered, “Right.” But he hadn’t waited for agreement. Again I heard the dial tone. I identified this interminable squalling with the anxiety level of the disengaged soul.

  I had to put myself into motion. And I couldn’t expect Renata to do anything for me. Renata, at business today, was attending an auction, and she’d have been miffed if I had called the auction rooms to ask her to take me to the Northwest Side. She’s an obliging and beautiful woman, she has marvelous breasts, but she takes offense at certain kinds of slights and quickly flares up. Well, I’d manage it all somehow. Perhaps the Mercedes could be driven to the shop. A tow truck might not be needed. And then I’d have to find a taxi or call the Emery Livery Service or Rent-a-Car. I wouldn’t ride the bus. There are too many armed drunkards and heroin users on the buses and trains. But, no, wait! First, I must call Murra and then run to the bank. Also I had to explain that I couldn’t drive Lish and Mary to their piano lesson. This made my heart particularly heavy, because I’m somewhat afraid of Denise. She still wields a certain power. Denise made a great production of these lessons. But with her everything was a production, everything was momentous, critical. All psychological problems relating to the children were presented with great intensity. Questions of child development were desperate, dire, mortal. If these kids were ruined it would be my fault. I had abandoned them at a most perilous moment in the history of civilization to take up with Renata. “That whore with fat tits”—was what Denise regularly called her. She spoke of beautiful Renata always as a gross tough broad. The trend of her epithets, it seemed, was to make a man of Renata and a woman of me.

  Denise, like my wealth, goes back to the Belasco Theatre. Trenck was played by Murphy Verviger and the star had a retinue (a dresser, a press agent, an errand boy). Denise, who was living with Verviger at the St. Moritz, arrived with his other attendants daily, carrying his script. Dressed in a plum velvet jump-suit she wore her hair down. Elegant, slender, slightly flat-chested, high-shouldered, wide across the top like an old-fashioned kitchen chair, she had large violet eyes, a marvelously rich subtle color in her face and a mysterious, seldom visible down, even over her nose. Because of the August heat the great doors offstage were open on the cement alleys and the daylight stealing in showed the appalling baldness and decay of the antique luxury. The Belasco was like a gilded cake-platter with grimed frosting. Verviger, his face deeply grooved at the mouth, was big and muscular. He resembled a skiing instructor. Some concept of intense refinement was eating at him. His head was shaped like a busby, a high solid arrogant rock covered with thick moss. Denise kept rehearsal notes for him. She wrote with terrible concentration, as if she were the smartest pupil in the class and the rest of the fifth grade were in pursuit. When she came to ask a question she held the script to her chest and spoke to me in a c
ondition of operatic crisis. Her voice seemed to make her own hair bristle and to dilate her astonishing eyes. She said, “Verviger wants to know how you’d like him to pronounce this word”— she printed it out for me, FINITE. “He says he can do it fin-it, or fine-it, or fine-ite. He doesn’t take my word for it—fine-ite!”

  I said, “Why so fancy? ... I don’t care what he does with it.” I didn’t add that I despaired of Verviger anyway. He had the play wrong from top to bottom. Maybe he was getting things right at the St. Moritz. That didn’t concern me then. I went home and told my friend Demmie Vonghel about the glaring bristling beauty at the Belasco, Verviger’s girlfriend.

  Well, ten years later Denise and I were husband and wife. And we were invited to the White House by the President and Mrs. Kennedy in black tie for a cultural evening. Denise consulted twenty or thirty women about dresses, shoes, gloves. Very intelligent, she always read up on national and world problems at the beauty parlor. Her hair was heavy and worn high. It wasn’t easy to be sure when she had had it done, but I could always tell from her dinner conversation whether she’d been to the hairdresser that afternoon, because she was a speed reader and covered every detail of world crisis under the dryer. “Do you realize what Khrushchev did in Vienna?” she said. So at the beauty salon, to prepare for the White House, she mastered Time and Newsweek and The U.S. News and World Report. On the flight to Washington we reviewed the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis and the Diem problem. Her nervous intensity is constitutional. After dinner she got hold of the President and spoke to him privately. I saw her cornering him in the Red Room. I knew that she was driving urgently over the tangle of lines dividing her own terrible problems—and they were all terrible!—from the perplexities and disasters of world politics. It was all one indivisible crisis. I knew that she was saying, “Mr. President, what can be done about this?” Well, we woo one another with everything we’ve got. I tittered to myself when I saw them together. But JFK could take care of himself, and he liked pretty women. I suspected that he read The U.S. News and World Report, too, and that his information might not be much better than her own. She’d have made him an excellent Secretary of State, if some way could be found to wake her before 11 a.m. For she’s quite marvelous. And a real beauty. And much more litigious than Humboldt Fleisher. He mainly threatened. But from the time of the divorce I have been entangled in endless ruinous lawsuits. The world has seldom seen a more aggressive subtle resourceful plaintiff than Denise. Of the White House I mainly remembered the impressive hauteur of Charles Lindbergh, the complaint of Edmund Wilson that the government had made a pauper of him, the Catskill resort music played by the Marine Corps orchestra, and Mr. Tate keeping time with his fingers on the knee of a lady.

  One of Denise’s big grievances was that I wouldn’t allow her to lead this kind of life. The great captain Citrine who once had burst the buckles of his armor in heroic scuffles now cooled gypsy Renata’s lust and in his dotage had bought a luxury Mercedes-Benz. When I came to call for Lish and Mary, Denise told me to make sure the car was well aired. She didn’t want it smelling of Renata. Butts stained with her lipstick had to be emptied from the ashtray. She once marched out of the house and did this herself. She said there must be no Kleenexes smeared with God-knows-what.

  Apprehensive, I picked out Denise’s number on the telephone. I was in luck, the maid answered, and I told her, “I can’t fetch the girls today. I’ve got car trouble.”

  Downstairs I found that I could squeeze into the Mercedes and though the windshield was bad, I thought I could manage the driving if the police didn’t stop me. I tested this by going to the bank where I drew the new money. It was given to me in a plastic envelope. I didn’t fold this packet but laid it next to my wallet. Then from a phone booth I made an appointment at the Mercedes shop. You’ve got to have an appointment—you don’t barge in to the garage as you did in the old mechanic days. Then, still on the pay phone, I tried again to get hold of George Swiebel. Apparently I had said, while sounding off during the card game, that George enjoyed going with his old father to the Baths on Division Street near what used to be Robey Street. Probably Cantabile hoped to catch George there.

  As a kid I went to the Russian Bath with my own father. This old establishment has been there forever, hotter than the tropics and rotting sweetly. Down in the cellar men moaned on the steam-softened planks while they were massaged abrasively with oak-leaf besoms lathered in pickle buckets. The wooden posts were slowly consumed by a wonderful decay that made them soft brown. They looked like beaver’s fur in the golden vapor. Perhaps Cantabile hoped to trap George here naked. Could there be any other reason why he had named this rendezvous? He might beat him, he might shoot him. Why had I talked so much!

  I said to George’s secretary, “Sharon? He’s not back? Now listen, tell him not to go to the schwitz on Division Street today. Not! It’s serious.”

  George said of Sharon, “She digs emergencies.” This is understandable. Two years ago she had her throat cut by a total stranger. This unknown black man stepped into George’s South Chicago office with an open razor. He swept it over Sharon’s throat like a virtuoso and disappeared forever. “The blood fell like a curtain,” said George. He knotted a towel about Sharon’s neck and rushed her to the hospital. George digs emergencies himself. He’s always looking for something basic, “honest,” “of the earth,” primordial. When he saw blood, a vital substance, he knew what to do. But of course George is also theoretical; he is a primitivist. This ruddy, big-muscled, blunt-handed George with his brown, humanly comprehensive eyes is not stupid except when he proclaims his ideas. He does this loudly, fiercely. And then I only grin at him because I know how kindly he is. He takes care of his old parents, of his sisters, of his ex-wife and their grown children. He denounces eggheads, but he really loves culture. He spends whole days trying to read difficult books, knocking himself out. Not with great success. And when I introduce him to intellectuals like my learned friend Durnwald, he shouts and baits them and talks dirty, his face gets red. Well, it’s that sort of curious moment in the history of human consciousness when the mind universally awakens and democracy originates, an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age. Humboldt, boyish, loved the life of the mind and I shared his enthusiasm. But the intellectuals one meets are something else again. I didn’t behave well with the mental beau monde of Chicago. Denise invited superior persons of all kinds to the house in Kenwood to discuss politics and economics, race, psychology, sex, crime. Though I served the drinks and laughed a great deal I was not exactly cheerful and hospitable. I wasn’t even friendly. “You despise these people!” Denise said, angry. “Only Durnwald is an exception, that curmudgeon.” This accusation was true. I hoped to lay them all low. In fact it was one of my cherished dreams and dearest hopes. They were against the True, the Good, the Beautiful. They denied the light. “You’re a snob,” she said. This was not accurate. But I wouldn’t have a thing to do with these bastards, the lawyers, Congressmen, psychiatrists, sociology professors, clergy, and art-types (they were mostly gallery-owners) she invited.

  “You’ve got to meet real people,” George said to me later. “Denise surrounded you with phonies, and now day in, day out you’re alone with tons of books and papers in that apartment and I swear you’re going to go nuts.”

  “Why no,” I said, “there’s yourself and Alec Szathmar, and my friend Richard Durnwald. And also Renata. And what about the people at the Downtown Club.”

  “Lots of good this guy Durnwald will do you. He’s the professor’s professor. And nobody can interest him. He’s heard it or read it all. When I try to talk to him I feel that I’m playing the ping-pong champion of China. I serve the ball, he smashes it back, and that’s the end of that. I have to serve again and pretty soon I’m out of balls.”

  He always came down heavily on Durnwald. There was a certain rivalry. He knew how attached I was to Dick Durnwald. In crude Chicago Durnwald, whom I admire
d and even adored, was the only man with whom I exchanged ideas. But for six months Durnwald had been at the University of Edinburgh, lecturing on Comte, Durkheim, Tönnies, Weber, and so on. “This abstract stuff is poison to a guy like you,” said George. “I’m going to introduce you to guys from South Chicago.” He began to shout. “You’re too exclusive, you’re going to dry out.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  So the fateful poker game was organized around me. But the guests knew that they had been invited as low company. Nowadays the categories are grasped by those who belong to them. It would have been obvious to them that I was some sort of mental fellow even if George hadn’t advertised me as such, boasting that my name was in reference books and that I was knighted by the French government. So what? It wasn’t as if I had been a Dick Cavett, a true celebrity. I was just another educated nut and George was showing me off to them and exhibiting them to me. It was nice of them to forgive me this great public-relations buildup. I was brought there by George to relish their real American qualities, their peculiarities. But they enriched the evening with their own irony and reversed the situation so that in the end my peculiarities were far more conspicuous. “As the game went on they liked you more and more,” said George. “They thought you were pretty human. Besides, there was Rinaldo Cantabile. He and his cousin were flashing cards to each other, and you were getting drunk and didn’t know what the hell was happening.”

  “So I was merely a contrast-gainer,” I said.

  “I thought contrast-gainer was just your term for married couples. You like a lady because she’s got a husband, a real stinker, who makes her look good.”